The design for combat resurrection effects has changed a good deal for Cataclysm, and we want to make sure players are clear on how spells like Rebirth and Create Soulstone now function. Rebirth has a 10-minute cooldown and Create Soulstone has a 15-minute cooldown. On raid boss encounters, you can only use one of these combat resurrection spells (so one Rebirth or one Soulstone) per attempt for 10-player raids. For 25-player raids you can use three forms of combat resurrection per raid boss attempt (so three of any combination of Rebirth and Soulstone). The count is incremented as soon as a player accepts a resurrection, so one can always choose not to accept if he or she wants someone else to get the resurrection instead. There is no equivalent of the Sated debuff (which tracks Bloodlust/Heroism usage), but you will get an error message if you try to resurrect too many players, and we might add tracking to our raid interface if there is demand for it. Outside of raid content, you can use as many battle resurrections as you have available.

For those of you currently participating in the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta test, please note that this functionality may not be fully implemented as of yet. If you notice combat resurrections are not currently functioning as explained here, this is just a heads-up about the updated design intent behind them.

Unless Soulstone is being changed, why does the harder to use combat rez (that being Soulstone, since you have to predict ahead of time who to Soulstone) have the longer cooldown?

One thing we’re considering with Soulstone is making it possible, in addition to its current functionality, to be cast on a dead player to give them the option of joining the living again.

Thankfully, they’ve finally clarified how they want combat rez to work for raiding in Cataclysm…and honestly, I like the change from a design perspective, even though it slightly hurts the value of druids. They’ve finally (let’s hope) cleaned up all the exploitative behavior permitted by Soulstones.

What exploit? Well, I’ll lay it out for you.

Create Soulstone is a very early Warlock spell (pre-20).

The soulstone buff disappears if the casting lock leaves the party/raid…but raids have slots for 40 people.

Profit!

Yes, I left out the ???, but you get the point. It was very common for top50 guilds to have a crapton of lock alts solely for Rerai…err, Soulstone buffs. It wasn’t especially common (it does take some time and some hassle to do), but limited attempt fights brought it back with a vengeance. This neatly closes that loophole.

I do think the limits are a little tight (I’d have preferred 2 for 10’s, and 4-5 for 25’s), however. As it stands currently, if a 10-man brings a lock and a druid, one of those two feels shafted because they can’t use a class core ability. (Yes, all other buffs are like this…but is this going to start to applying to all other in-combat abilities? Only one MD because hunters can trivialize add fights? Only one Dark Intent because it boosts DPS too much? Etc. It made sense to limit Heroism since it affected the whole raid, but brezzes are individual.) As described, though, the version of Soulstone they’re describing would be MORE powerful than a druid brez, which feels…odd, from a lore point of view. (Hi, I’m Joe, your friendly neighborhood warlock, and I need to store a piece of all of your souls before we start this fight in case you die. Right.) I wonder if shammy self-rez is included in these limits (Heck, what about DK’s ability to raise people as ghouls? :)). I’d assume it is, but we’ll have to wait until that’s confirmed.

At least this gives me a better justification for refusing to rez the DPS who stood in the fire. (Sorry, gotta save it in case we lose a tank/healer, no hard feelings.)